Market Economics, Innovation and Rule of Law
This week our conversation is with Patrick Kilbride, who is a public policy expert with significant expertise at the intersection between market economics, innovation and intellectual property. A former Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative during the George W. Bush Administration, Kilbride has spent the last 15 years working on innovation policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, most recently as Senior Vice President of the Global Innovation Policy Center. Several months ago, Kilbride decided to leave the Chamber to chart his own course, founding Kilbride Public Affairs, where he will continue to engage global policymakers in support of market economics, innovation and the rule of law.
“One of the things that excites me is a chance to reframe how people think about innovation,” Kilbride told me during our conversation.
Over the years I’ve known Kilbride our conversations have always taught me something or given me a different perspective. He is quick to point out that he is not a lawyer, but instead a public policy expert who has spent his career focusing on trade, markets and the relationship between innovation and intellectual property as it pertains to trade, markets and business. It is the broader economic perspective that focuses him like a laser in the first instance on the objectives that our policies and laws are intended to achieve, and then subsequently on the legalities.
“The problem we have globally and historically is that innovation has usually occurred as a one-off, maybe as a flash of brilliance, but it hasn’t been able to be sustained or consistent because for most of human history and in most places in the world today, the conditions were not present to enable an investment in sustained and transformative innovation,” Kilbride explained. “What the U.S. system did was to democratize invention and innovation, to say we’re going to make rights available to anyone who can do something innovative and allow them to invest themselves, not as a hobby, not as a sideline, but as a living.”
At the beginning of our conversation Kilbride explains that “one of the most remarkable things about the American economy is that what we have done historically does seem to be so unique.” He then pointed to five distinguishing features, which we spend the rest of our conversation discussing. According to Kilbride, what makes the U.S. unique is that the American economic approach enables risk taking and failure, fosters competition and ensures goods and services can cross state lines, provides property rights, is based on the rule of law, and establishes markets.
“We are better than anyone else in the world at mobilizing resources and making them available for investment in new areas,” Kilbride said. “You have to set those conditions where you can access all of that private capital. And then you can use it for the high risk, the high-end deliverables that really change the world. You know, those technologies for energy that are going to tackle climate change, the new cures for HIV and cancers, the new modes of food production that will, you know, feed 8 billion plus and growing people around the world.”
The rule of law in the United States that has allowed markets to operate effectively and with dynamism because “it took all the friction out of the system,” Kilbride said toward the very end of our conversation, wrapping it all together. “When we fail to provide rule of law whether it’s in a store or at the border or in intellectual property then the system starts to break down and we don’t have those dynamic benefits of a market economy.”
Indeed, if you were going to put your finger on the one thing over the last generation that has led to a breakdown, including a breakdown in the U.S. intellectual property sector, it is the demise of the rule of law and the lack of certainty that comes with efficient infringement and a constantly shifting, and retroactively applied, legal playing field, which deters the investment and efforts we need to create the innovations society most wants.
To hear this entire conversation, listen wherever you get your podcasts (links here). Or visit IPWatchdog Unleashed on Buzzsprout.
Gene Quinn
Gene Quinn is a patent attorney and a leading commentator on patent law and innovation policy. Mr. Quinn has twice been named one of the top 50 most influential people […see more]
